Crowdsourcing green

October 2, 2011

We is smarter than me.

That’s the premise behind a partnership between the Environmental Defense Fund and InnoCentive. You probably know EDF–they’re a (mostly) business friendly nonprofit that looks for solutions to environmental problems. InnoCentive is a company that has built an open Internet platform to connect other firms, governments and NGOs to creative people all over the world who can help them solve problems.

Last week, EDF and Innocentive declared a winner in their first challenge, which looked for a new approach to the old problem of agricultural nitrate pollution: He is Patrick Fuller, 23, who is studying for a PhD. in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern. He’ll be awarded $5,000 for his idea, about which more below.

Beth Trask

To learn more about the partnership, I spoke with Beth Trask, who leads, along with David Witzel, leads what EDF calls its innovation exchange, an effort to spread new “green” solutions among companies.

“Like many people,” Beth told me, “we’ve been looking with much interest at the open innovation space. Basically, the concept is that there are many more ideas and possible solutions out there in the world than any given company or organization can tap into on its own.”

Breaking down big problems into their discrete parts is a key to success on Innocentive, according to Dwayne Spradlin, the company’s president and CEO. “Our view of the world is that very few problems are large, structural problems,” he told me by phone. “If you frame the challenge right, you dramatically increase the odds of getting a solution. I can’t say how religious we are about focus.”

InnoCentive was developed by drug company Eli Lilly in 2001, and spun out as its own firm in 2005. Today, Spradlin says, it manages challenges in a variety of fields, some unexpected. [I can’t wait for the company to solve this one — Increasing People’s Ability to Start and Stay on Task. A $10,000 award awaits the winner.] InnoCentive has workedon challenges with Procter & Gamble, NASA and the Rockefeller Foundation.

They get to tap into a network of about 250,000 “solvers” who are located in more than 200 countries. About 60% have masters degrees or PhD’s, the company says.

Patrick Fuller

Pat Fuller, the Northwestern student, is on his way. A fellow grad student who had won an award told him about Innocentive, and as he scanned the site a few months ago, EDF’s request for help with fertilizer runoff got his attention. He was inspired to come up with a solution not so much by his current reserch–which is mostly computational, he told me–but by something he’d seen growing up in Rhode Island where he’d worked in a store that sold fruits and vegetables. A farmer there told him that he’d used algae collected from local ponds to help his plants grow faster. So Pat wondered what would happen if the runoff could be captured, and the nitrogen-rich water recyled to grow algae, as fertilizer.

“I sat down for a weekend, worked out the mathematics and wrote the paper,” Pat told me. Nice way for a grad student to earn $5,000. Says Beth: “We never would have found this kid.”

This is more than a nice story, though. Patrick’s idea will be tested by Iowa soybean and corn farmers, who have built a good working relationship with the Environmental Defense. As EDF explains, while farmers have good reason to want to cut down on wasted fertilizer, so do the rest of us–sediment and fertilizer runoff “create algae-filled ‘dead zones’ and pollute drinking water supplies” in the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, maybe, EDF, InnoCentive, Iowa farmers, a $5,000 prize and a 23-year-old grad student will find a way to change that.

Mark: Good piece. You should check out the work of one of the WJF’s partners — the Conrad Foundation (http://www.conradawards.org). They are challenging high school students to create innovative products using science, technology, and entrepreneurship to solve real-world, 21st century problems. The WJF is helping with their Clean Tech prize, but they’re also doing Space Exploration and Health & Nutrition.